This disclosure relates generally to model-driven process development, and more particularly to a system and method for refining model entities based on a metamodel definition.
Business Process Management (BPM) tools allow users to model, execute, and monitor your business processes based on a common process model. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is an industry standard graphic notation for representing business process workflows. BPMN shows the end-to-end flow of a business process in a flowchart-type style, and is often used with a user-interface-oriented BPMN tool. One example of a BPMN tool is SAP's NetWeaver BPM component (NW BPM, also referred to as “Galaxy”), which is designed to help users improve the efficiency of business processes, reduce errors in complex repetitive tasks, and lower exception-handling costs. With SAP BPM, users can compose process steps, define business rules and exceptions, model process flows using BPMN, execute process models efficiently, and support interaction with running processes via personalized user interfaces or interactive forms.
In such model-driven development, a metamodel is a model that describes how models can be constructed. In the metamodel, classes can be specified which represent domain entities and define their relationships. These entities and their relationships also contain information for tools built on top of this metamodel, such as a BPMN tool, for example. However, this information currently does not provide any functionality in the modeling infrastructure that rapidly adjusts diagram elements based on a given metamodel definition.